Alexander Lane

Welcome to the home of Alexander Lane, author of the Nightmare Vacations series and the In Machina trilogy.

Blood River launch flyer

Blood River cover art by Alexander Lane & Sharon Bruton

The In Machina trilogy

Mecs: Strong. Loyal. Smart enough to do the jobs you hate.

Mecsy Inc promotional slogan, 2120.

In Machina is an epic space opera series with big themes and sassy AIs, for readers of James S A Corey’s The Expanse sequence, Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries.

Image credit: Judy Schmidt


  • Book vs film: Team Book takes the win

    Book vs film: Team Book takes the win

    Last week I closed up Book vs Film: a season of reviews comparing eight novels to their big-screen adaptations. The books won, but as the cliché goes, it’s about the journey, not the destination. The working title for this season of The Book Corner was “good book, shit film”. As group-sourced projects often go, not…


  • Book vs film: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

    Book vs film: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

    The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 8: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones The whimsical beauty of Hayao Miyazaki’s hit 2004 animation of Howl’s Moving Castle has eclipsed the clever fairytale of Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel. Which one’s your favourite? The Book Corner The Book Corner is a regular break…


  • Book vs film: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft

    Book vs film: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft

    The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 7: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft. Hold on to your sanity for 1927’s The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft, and its 2019 adaptation starring Nicolas Cage. The Book Corner The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing…


  • The only good gravity is one gravity

    The only good gravity is one gravity

    Partial gravity — anything that’s not the same as Earth — used to be a special effects expense that no-one wanted. It’s 2024, we have cheap SFX, so why does everywhere in space still look like it’s either zero-g or on Earth? After all, there’s just one place in the universe — our home —…


  • Pets in spaaaaace

    Pets in spaaaaace

    Animals in space don’t have a happy history, but more than half of humans share their lives with an animal companion. Space pets will be a thing, even if they’re rarely found in science fiction. Laika and her doomed Soviet space dog chums, the NASA chimps, and the countless small animals sent to experience things…


  • The Taste of Space 5: Extraterrestrial Meal Times

    The Taste of Space 5: Extraterrestrial Meal Times

    The zero-g fryer is bubbling, the smell of fresh bread fills your spacecraft and a bell chimes the shift change. The crew gathers in the ship’s mess. We’ve gone from growing food and making meat to off-Earth cooking, so what will meal times look like in space? The first question is when to eat. In…


  • How to create Word-friendly headings in Scrivener compile

    How to create Word-friendly headings in Scrivener compile

    Scrivener is my go-to writing tool for just about everything1 but it has a weakness: compiling Word documents with built-in headings that make them easy to navigate. Here’s how to solve that problem. I don’t often write about Scrivener because there’s a community of people who really know their way around it, not least the…


  • You do not own your AI-generated writing

    You do not own your AI-generated writing

    If you want to publish or submit AI-generated writing, you need to know this: you don’t own that work. No one knows who owns that work. You had an idea and created the prompt that lead to the work, but in the world of intellectual property, ideas are worth nothing. Expression is everything. That’s why…


  • If you’re using AI for research, you need to know this

    If you’re using AI for research, you need to know this

    If you’re going to use AI for writing or research, you need to know two things. The first is that AI doesn’t know anything. There are other important things to know about AI. It’s trained on content taken without permission of the creators. It contributes to rising greenhouse emissions and power consumption from technology companies.…



This page contains affiliate links.
I will earn a small commission if you complete a purchase via one of these links.